Cerril followed the flickering glow of the candle he'd taken from Hekkel down into the bowels of the secret crypt beneath the burial house. The spiral staircase had either been crooked when it had been installed, or it had shifted during the decades or perhaps hundreds of years it had been there. Cerril had to lean away from the central pole at times and against it at others.
Still, the spiral staircase was a short trip to the rooms below.
Once he gained the ground, Cerril discovered that the floor there had been hewn from bedrock then covered over with stone. Dank, bare earth walls drank down the candle's glow. In a half-dozen places, though, small streams of water trickled along the walls and ran through cracks between the stone flooring. The thick, cloying smell of damp earth and rancid water tickled his nose as he stared around the chamber.
The other boys gathered around Cerril. They stayed behind him and well within the fragile safety of the candle.
"We shouldn't be here," one of the boys said. "This is a bad place. I can feel it."
"Damn," Two-Fingers said. "This is a cemetery. It's a bad place for anybody."
"Grave robbers steal from them that are fresh dead," Hekkel said. "Only reason they don't steal from them that are old-dead is because somebody done got to them."
Cerril raised the flickering candle and said, "Nobody's been here since this place was sealed."
"You don't know that," Hekkel said.
Feeling Malar's coin warm and heavy in his hand, Cerril said, "Yes, I do."
He moved forward, drawn by the coin's pull. The candlelight slid across the ceiling. For a moment he thought none of the others were going to follow him, then he heard the rustle of their clothing.
The trickle of water running down the walls echoed throughout the room. Boots and bare feet slapped against the wet floor.
"It's raining outside," Hekkel said. "Coming harder now."
Cerril knew that. The sound of the storm rumbled in the distance, and the sibilant rush of rain threaded through the burial house.
"Who built this place?" Two-Fingers asked.
"Eldath's priests," Cerril answered.
Cerril followed a curving, narrow passageway from the chamber the ladder had led down into. The candlelight had no problem illuminating the height or the width of the passageway, but it didn't penetrate the depth.
"Why?" Two-Fingers asked.
"To keep people away from whatever is being kept in here," Hekkel said. "Any half-brained lummox could have figured that out."
"Probably got all kinds of gold and treasures down here," someone said. "We'll fill up our pockets and get out of here before anyone can stop us."
"Yeah," another boy said. "Alagh?n is a city filled with secrets. It could be somebody stuck a corpse down here and then forgot all about it. Whatever they left on it will be our gain."
"I'll bet they didn't leave anything on the corpse," Hekkel griped. "I don't see how anything could be left as long as this thing must have been left here. Chances are that rats have been at whatever was left. I'll bet you can't even strip the clothes from the body, wash them, and sell them to a ragman."
"We're not here for rags," Cerril said.
He wanted the other boys to stay brave, to stay behind him.
"Then what are we here for?" Hekkel demanded.
"Something more. Otherwise Malar's coin wouldn't be pulling me."
Cerril stepped with more care, following the downward slope of the uneven floor. He wondered if the whole underground area had somehow been wrenched out of kilter at some time in the past.
"Should have let that man keep it," a boy farther back in the crowd muttered.
Cerril started to turn around and curse the boy, if he could find him, but his attention was riveted to the end of the passageway. The candlelight caught the walls surrounding them, twisting shadows as the flame danced, but only revealed the tilted rectangle of darkness at the passageway's end.
Blood boomed in Cerril's ears as he raised the candle to get a better look.
"There's something in there," someone said.
"I thought I saw someone moving," another boy said.
"That's just your imagination," Two-Fingers growled, but a quaver of fear rang in his voice. "Whatever's in there has been dead a long time."
"Just because it's dead don't mean it can't hurt you."
"We should leave," Hekkel whispered. "Just turn around and walk back out of this place and forget it ever existed."